Exodus 38:24

Summary

The verse totals the gold used in constructing the sanctuary: all the gold employed in the sacred work, specifically the gold from the wave offering, amounted to twenty-nine talents and seven hundred thirty shekels, measured by the sanctuary shekel standard.

Key words

• kol ("all", H3605) — construct form appearing twice (lines 1 and 9), creating a totalizing frame: "all the gold... in all the work."
• 'asui ("was used", H6213A) — qal passive participle, masculine singular, describing the gold as a completed, already-worked substance rather than an ongoing action.
• melakhah / me.Le.khet ("work", H4399) — appears both absolutely (melakhah) and in construct (meLeket haqodesh, "work of the holy place"), linking the gold's use directly to sacred labor.
• tenuphah ("wave-offering", H8573) — feminine noun in construct with zehav ("gold of the wave-offering"), specifying the gold's origin as a particular offering category.
• shekel haqodesh ("shekel of the holy place", H8255 + H6944G) — repeated construct phrase establishing an official weight standard distinct from ordinary measures.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence opens with an extended nominal phrase functioning as a casus pendens (a fronted topic): kol hazzahav he'asui lammelakhah bekhol meleket haqodesh — "all the gold that was used for the work, in all the work of the holy place." This entire clause has no verb of its own; it sets up the subject before the main predication arrives. The narrative then pivots with vayehi ("and it was", H1961), a common Biblical Hebrew device introducing a quantified statement. The true subject of this verb is zehav hattenuphah ("the gold of the wave-offering"), followed by the numerals tesha' ve'esrim kikar ("nine and twenty talent[s]") and sheva' me'ot ushloshim sheqel ("seven hundred and thirty shekel[s]"). The repetition of beshekel haqodesh at the end anchors the count to a specific administrative standard, distinguishing it from any generic shekel weight.

Differences between versions

The Septuagint text supplied for this reference describes construction details of the bronze altar (rings, poles, a bronze grating) rather than a gold total, reflecting the well-documented reordering of material in LXX Exodus 35–40 relative to the Hebrew sequence. The Vulgate renders tenuphah as "quod oblatum est in donariis" ("what was offered in gifts"), an interpretive expansion rather than a direct equivalent of "wave-offering." The SBLIBRE Spanish version converts the ancient units into an approximate modern equivalent ("unos mil kilos," "about a thousand kilos") rather than preserving the talent/shekel count found in the Hebrew, LXX-adjacent Vulgate, and other translations like BSB and RV1909.